Thursday 17 September 1998
Novell banking on NT backlash
By KIRSTY NEEDHAM
"We made it, as of today, in beating Microsoft
because they don't have a product," gloated
Novell's senior vice president of corporate
marketing, John Slitz, in Sydney yesterday
where the company announced shipment of
NetWare 5 in Australia.
Netware 5 is Novell's embrace of Internet
protocols, promising to bring the reliability and
management Netware has provided for
corporations' local area networks to the wider
Web. Microsoft has admitted it will be another
year before its Windows NT 5.0 will be ready.
Slitz said a Novell survey had revealed 80 per
cent of businesses were looking to shift their
computer networks to pure IP in the next few
years. IDC has forecast worldwide e-commerce
to be worth $US 400 billion.
"Novell has taken the technology leadership on
what the network of the future will need," said
Gartner Group Australia technology marketplace
consultant Mitch Radomir.
"Microsoft are getting mindshare even if their
product can't do it. Now Novell has 12 months
where users will have a viable option to
implement now. Users are losing their reason to
wait."
Worldwide, Novell expects to convert 100,00 of
the 350,000 businesses that have been
beta-testing Netware 5 into sales.
Chief technology officer Glenn Ricart, who early
in his career formed the shape of the Internet
at the United State's Department of Defence's
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA),
said the Internet has been "organised by the
plumbers", that is Internet Service Providers.
For the network economy to proceed,
companies needed to be able to organise it to
match their business needs, he said. Problem
areas include the unwieldy size of the Net, and
how to find and securely identify your business
partners.
He said that Novel Directory Services (NDS) will
be key to improving this. Microsoft's answer to
NDS, Active Directory is still yet to materialise.
Novell said it had an installed user base of 80
million customers worldwide, a similar number to
that using the Internet.
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